Nothing But The Truth

When Zoe was a child of eight, and first learned how to use the slow, huge brick that was her family's Dell computer, i.e, go on the Internet and not just Paint, she was totally engrossed by it. It fascinated her how a (in her eyes) relatively simple machine could do so much. She looked at the popular websites: at some point she found Wikipedia. She hated it. There was so much writing, such long, boring words, sentences and paragraphs.

However her eight-year-old disgust also triggered curiosity to find out more about this website.

She did not understand it at first. What were you supposed to do with it? It wasn't until her teacher set her a class project on the Romans that she found it useful. She typed "Roman clothes" into Google and the first link led her straight to Wikipedia. There was so much information! She copied it all down, word for word, and thought it was the best project she'd ever done. Obviously her teacher didn't, though.

That was when Zoe first learned about copy-paste.

Anyway, this is not about how Zoe learned about copy-paste; this is about how Zoe began writing to a prisoner on Death Row.

Zoe began to use Wikipedia more and more often, to find out new things to add to her collection of thoughts and knowledge. She would click on one article, look at the related articles, and click on the underlined words. One day, after clicking on many of the underlined words, she was led to an article about a man called Charles West, an American on Death Row: he had murdered his whole family in North Carolina. The Wikipedia article noted that his court case had virtually no evidence yet he was still convicted shortly after the murders. What's more, she found out he wrote many poems, about his family and his life on death row. There was a collection of them shown. Zoe found them beautiful. Written, she thought, by the hands of a true artist. How could someone so talented, who wrote so beautifully, commit such extremities? To her the poems seemed to be written by a man of soulfulness and kindness. The poems were peaceful, not hateful. She thought back to the fact he had been convicted to death with barely any hard evidence: Zoe decided to do something to help.